★★★★☆ Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Lincoln was a politician!
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Lincoln was a politician!
Abraham Lincoln presents a dilemma to the American mind. On the one hand, he is one of the few figures who, despite our political polarization, commands near-universal respect. On the other hand, "politician " has come to be a term of opprobrium -- most Americans can think of few things worse to say of a person than that he/she is a politician. I think many Americans deal with this contradiction by attempting to deny that Lincoln was REALLY a politician. That position is unsupportable -- clearly Lincoln was a politician, and a masterful one.
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin seizes this dilemma by the horns and firmly wrestles it to the ground, showing how Lincoln accomplished his political miracles.
I read Team of Rivals in 2006, not very long after it came out. It is now 2023, yet I still have a vivid memory of parts of it, and in particular how Goodwin accomplished the goal of portraying a skilled politician as a good person. Here I will recall (somewhat vaguely -- it was 17 years ago that I read the book) two stories that illustrated how Lincoln worked.
One of Lincoln's best tricks was allowing people to underestimate him. Americans had an extraordinarily low opinion of Lincoln even after he won his first election. The correspondence of his colleagues of the time is full of vulgar insults. In one early example, before Lincoln had really entered politics, celebrated lawyers Harding and Stanton (later to become Lincoln's Sectary of War), defended the Manny company in a patent infringement suit. They hired Lincoln, a practicing lawyer, to write a brief, which Lincoln did. Before the case went to trial, they decided they no longer needed Lincoln, but they failed to tell him so. Lincoln showed up in Cincinnati for the trial. Here is how Goodwin describes his meeting with Stanton and Harding:
Years later, Harding could still recall the shock of his first sight of the “tall, rawly boned, ungainly back woodsman, with coarse, ill-fitting clothing, his trousers hardly reaching his ankles, holding in his hands a blue cotton umbrella with a ball on the end of the handle.” Lincoln introduced himself and proposed, “Let’s go up in a gang.” At this point, Stanton drew Harding aside and whispered, “Why did you bring that d——d long armed Ape here . . . he does not know any thing and can do you no good.” With that, Stanton and Harding turned from Lincoln and continued to court on their own.
In the days that followed, Stanton “managed to make it plain to Lincoln” that he was expected to remove himself from the case. Lincoln did withdraw, though he remained in Cincinnati to hear the arguments. Harding never opened Lincoln’s manuscript, “so sure that it would be only trash.”
It is still hard for me to understand how Lincoln sustained this kind of treatment. A person of his abilities must have been aware that he deserved better, and yet he remained outwardly humble and allowed people to hold him in contempt throughout his career. Stanton eventually learned to love Lincoln.
The second story concerns a power struggle in his cabinet while he was president. One of his cabinet secretaries (possibly Chase? -- I'll pretend it was Chase) initiated maneuvers to make himself the most powerful member of the cabinet. In the course of these maneuvers he told different colleagues different things. He imagined himself to be doing this behind Lincoln's back. Lincoln was aware of all the maneuvers, but allowed Chase (if Chase it was) to think he remained in the dark. (There's that trick again -- "Let them believe I'm a fool.") He found out from other cabinet members what Chase had promised, called a cabinet meeting, and laid it all out. Thus he made a trap of honesty and humility in which he caught his opponent.
So, yeah, Lincoln was a good man, an honest man, a humble man, and at the same time an extraordinarily skilled politician.
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln on Amazon